The SR Conversation: John Gray x Peter Thiel

On the nature of science and the delusions of our current cultural moment.

Peter Thiel, who had a nomadic childhood as the son of German parents who eventually settled in America, co-founded PayPal, the online payments company, in 1998 at the age of 31. He ran the company, working alongside Elon Musk, until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He has since become one of the world’s richest venture capitalists, having been a founding investor in Facebook and SpaceX. He also chairs Palantir, the data mining company which has ongoing contracts with the British state.

Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican convention in support of Donald Trump, on whose presidential transition team he served and to whom he donated $1.25 million. He has disavowed funding any presidential campaign this year.

In October he gave the Roger Scruton memorial lecture in Oxford and spoke with the philosopher and New Statesman contributing writer John Gray afterwards. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. They address the question of science – what it is, when it works, how it has been held back – and the delusions of our current cultural moment.

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John Gray

Let’s begin to explore these deep questions that have been put before us by Peter. I think we should recognize that they are all attempts to shake us out of our distraction. There are three types of distraction here. The first is the way in which cultural debates about woke and anti-woke very often lead us to turn our thoughts away from fundamental contradictions in economic life. And this is a way in which Peter’s way of thinking has combined certain aspects of libertarian and Marxist critiques of our current economic regime.

The second is that the paradigmatic contrast which is supposed to exist – between ethics and politics as not being progressive and science and technology as being prototypically progressive – is not in fact substantiated by the evidence; that science and technology, except in a few narrow fields, have been stuck in the same categories of thinking, the same theoretical frameworks, and even the same types of technology for about 50 years.

And then the third type of distraction concerns how questions of religion, of how we ultimately think about good and evil, have been pushed to one side by wokeness, which is not at all, as some people have said on the right, a repaganization of the world but a type of hyper-Christianity emptied of transcendence and forgiveness.

And that leads to my question to you, Peter: is there some way out of this? One of the things you said tonight was that 20th century movements like fascism, or writers like Ayn Rand, or thinkers like Bronze Age Pervert today, in attempting to get back to a classical or pre-Christian view of the world – in which energy and vitality and power are what matters and victimhood is contemptible – cannot succeed in a post-revelation world.

In the same way, we can’t go back to earlier forms of science, we can’t go back to earlier forms of economic thinking, although I thought what you said about Henry George was very interesting. Are we really stuck? Is it possible to unstick us?

Peter Thiel

Well, my facile answer is always the first thing you have to do to solve problems is to talk about them. So I think that as long as we have this, as you described, Groundhog Day of wokeness, we are not going to be unstuck and we’re going to be in this zero-sum, Malthusian, ever nastier political context. I think there are ways that we could unstick ourselves in all three dimensions.

Neither pure capitalism nor pure globalism work economically. To unshackle ourselves economically, one should start by attacking the extraordinarily distorted real estate market. It’s very hard because you would destroy trillions of dollars in value in doing it, but the distortions have to give way at some point. Maybe it’s a technological fix. The way the problems that Henry George identified with real estate were historically solved was by having an open frontier in America, powered in the 19th century by the railroads. Then the frontier was populated and closed. And then late 19th, early 20th century, the cities start to have this Georgist runaway real estate price effect, rising inequality, and you get progressivism as a response. And then in the 20th century, in a way, another frontier was opened with the automobile and the highways and the suburbs, and that relieved the pressure on the runaway costs. But now that technology has run its course.

Is there some way to reopen a frontier in real estate? The possibility where I think the jury is very out, though it doesn’t look that promising in 2023, would be remote work. Could the internet be a way that people are not stuck in these cities? And that would reset all these real estate values tremendously because even in a rather densely populated country like England, there is plenty of space if you’re not forced to be within the green belt of London itself. And in the United States even more so.

Or to address science and technology, one must ask why the progress slowed. My optimistic belief is that it was not that we just ran out of ideas. It’s that there were these deformations of culture. We became too risk-averse, too bureaucratic, too reliant on peer review in the sciences. And I think we could be making a lot more progress in a lot of areas. We don’t want to minimize or trivialize people’s fears of technology, but I think you could have a very different balance there.

And then certainly the questions about the larger meaning of life or the meaning of history are ones that I think we’d all do well to confront more.

Gray

What you’ve said implies, and I agree, that the so-called consensus that prevails between Sunak and Starmer is far more a consensus on what we’re not supposed to think about than it is on anything positive. Because the big problems you’ve mentioned, the problems of stagnation in science, the problems of real estate in London and Oxford and throughout the country, the problems of generational inequity in which young people can’t find any way to live: they’re all hardly addressed at all. There’s a bit of commentary in the newspapers and so on, but in terms of thinking about active solutions, there perhaps may be some dim subliminal awareness among these politicians that solving them would involve big losses for somebody?

Thiel

Yes, or certainly big losses for them in the election. It’s certainly not limited to the UK, but an outside perspective I would have, is that it seems to me that there’s a secret agreement between Sunak and Starmer to talk as much as possible about culture wars. And then if you have even basic economic questions like how to solve runaway deficit spending – with higher taxes or lower entitlements? – they both have a look-ahead function where if we talk about that, we’ll lose 10 or 15 percent of the voters. Maybe not quite as many for Sunak; at some point it’s hard to lose 10 or 15 percent of the voters. But when everybody does that, when all the solutions are outside the Overton window, we’re confined in this very narrow box and the Groundhog Day will continue until at some point something really breaks.

Gray

So there won’t be a Nietzschean Groundhog Day, it won’t really be eternal. It’s going to break down, isn’t it? I mean, that’s one way or the other, even if only for economic reasons, but we don’t know when or how.

Thiel

Sure. I think there certainly are all kinds of dimensions one could point to where where it is simply not stable. The demographics are not stable. The deficits are not stable. We had pseudo-stability and deficits for 40 years in the United States and much of the Western world where the deficits were too big, but the interest rates went steadily down. Something around that seems to have broken in the last year or two. So I think even something as basic as deficits financed at zero percent interest rates, it seemed like the 2010s could go on forever and that seems over.

Gray

And they haven’t. Does that bleed back into the cultural and the religious questions you discussed? Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.

Thiel

Yes, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a byproduct of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.

Gray

To adapt themselves to the Soviet and Bolshevik reality, one of the Cosmists’ slogans was, “Dead of the world, unite!”

Thiel

So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.

Gray

There’s also a nihilistic version of science, a Brave New World version, which sees itself as pacifying the spiritual and mental anguish and doubts of human beings by giving them access to drugs and pornography and all kinds of things which distract them forever from these fundamental existential questions, the religious questions. I mean what would work to exterminate religion or exterminate the need for religion would be to put everyone to sleep with drug dreams, drug highs. And of course, drugs are a tremendous feature of life at the moment, aren’t they, in many countries?

Thiel

I wouldn’t even go that far. Even iPhones distract you from the fact you’re in a hundred-year-old subway in London or New York, or the fact the environment hasn’t changed. I wouldn’t say there’s a fully intentional conspiracy, but the particular, narrow forms of technological progress that we’ve had in the last 50 years have made us oblivious to these things.

One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.

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Britain’s creative industries have gone from strength to strength over the past decade. Hear from West Midlands mayor Andy Street, and content creator Patricia Bright, at our Creativity Unleashed event on why this sector is crucial for driving regional growth across the UK.

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— Harry, Will & Pippa.

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